That time Batman told Raphael the Ninja Turtle, ‘This is where I watched my parents die’

polygon.com:

Batman is standing in the rain. That’s not unusual for Batman, but behind him is someone very out of place: a Ninja Turtle. And what the Dark Knight is saying breaks the boundaries of the absurd. With grumpy little frowns on each of their faces, Batman intones, “This is where I watched my parents die, Raphael.”

Unlike many memetic comic book panels, this one isn’t even Photoshopped. OK, sure, there’s a version that goes around where someone has drawn in a word balloon for Raph — but that’s not the part of the panel that anyone talks about. It’s the panel where Batman tells Raphael this is where his parents died, not the panel where Raphael says “Cowabummer!” to Batman. From such things is virality made.

And yet, it is a cowabummer. Out of context, this single panel from 2016’s Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles miniseries paints the book as gratuitously, obliviously grim, when it’s actually a mashup so earnest it borders on camp. Yes, it’s a comic with a scene where Batman shows Raphael the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle where he watched his parents die. But the truth of the matter is if every Batman and Ninja Turtles story was as smart as this scene, we’d have a lot more great Batman and Ninja Turtles stories.

Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its two sequel series are actually pretty good. And they have real talent behind them: blockbuster comics writer James Tynion IV and DC Comics mainstay Freddie E. Williams II. The two opened the first book in medias res, with the turtles and Splinter already in Gotham, hot on the heels of Shredder and the Foot Clan. It’s all a dimensional teleportation mishap involving Krang, and to complicate matters, every day our mutated heroes spend in the DC Universe brings them closer